Apple did a great step introducing Time Machine as an easy backup-solution for everyone (with a Mac & Mac OS 10.5).

While its a great thing in general it has to be configured for some users regarding the scheduling.

Till now the only solution i knew was editing

com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

Inside this file you have to modify the following section / key:

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Where 3600 represents 3600 seconds as backup interval.

Well for those unwilling to edit .plist files take a look at TimeMachineScheduler.

It can…..

Quote:

• Set the interval from 1 to 12 hours.
• Run the backup manually or automatically also at startup, login or when the daemon has been loaded.
• Display the status of the daemon, of the backup volume and if the backup is currently running.
• Automount, an option to mount and unmount the backup volume automatically (see known problems).
• Option to hide the backup volume (to take effect a Finder relaunch is required).

Links:

• TimeMachineScheduler Homepage
• Apple Time Machine

Bombich Software released Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1

Quote:

Among the new features are:

• Support for block-level disk-to-disk clones.
• Synchronization built-in, not bolted on.
• Support for backing up across the network to another Macintosh.
• Advanced scheduling capabilities — Backup tasks can now be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or you can indicate that a backup task should run when the backup device is attached (e.g. an iPod). You don’t even need to be logged in for your backups to occur!
• CCC recognizes iPods specifically, allowing time for the iPod:iTunes synchronization to complete.
• The ability to drill down into folders to select exactly what gets copied and what doesn’t (you can drill down indefinitely).
• Built-in software update feature notifies you when updates are available.

See the complete release history here

If you want to change the backup interval of Time Machine do the following steps:

• Goto Finder
• Navigate to: /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
• Backup the file: com.apple.backupd-auto.plist
• Open: com.apple.backupd-auto.plist in a text editor.

The file should look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.apple.backupd-auto</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper</string>
<string>-auto</string>
</array>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<false/>
<key>KeepAlive</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</plist>

The relevant part is the key: StartInterval. Change it’s integer value like you want. The default value in 10.5.2 is: 3600, which means 3600 seconds or 60 minutes.

Based on this article on macosxhints.com

Yeah we all love Time Machine….or at least the idea behind it

Unfortunaly many users do hate the dialog which pops up, each time you plug-in a new external device.

So … if you have already defined your backup-target and Time Machine is working as suppose,d there is an easy way to disable this dialog for new disks plugged into your mac.

• Open Terminal.app
• Enter:
  • defaults write com.apple.TimeMachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

If you want to enable this dialog again, just replace YES in the command above with a NO and done.

Hope you enjoy this hint (based on macosxhints.com)

James Duncan wrote an interessting article about restoring a Leopard installation from Time Machine.

His conclusion as quote:

In short, Time Machine passed the “Trust, but Verify” challenge with flying colors. I’m pretty happy about that as it means that I can recommend that my friends and family—including my Dad who just bought an iMac not too long ago—can use Time Machine as a totally automatic backup mechanism. There are, however, two caveats to using Time Machine as your only backup strategy. The first is that you really should keep your data in at least three places and one of those places should be offsite. You should either continue with your existing offsite backup strategy for your most important documents or maybe you should consider rotating two disks as Time Machine volumes. Then again, if you’re currently not backing up at all, having even a single Time Machine backup volume is a massive improvement.

The second caveat is that restoring from a Time Machine backup is not particularly fast. If you often find yourself on deadline, hitting a half-day’s worth of downtime due to a hard drive crash might not be acceptable to you. In fact, if you have a hard drive crash, you may be looking at a full day’s worth of downtime by the time you secure a new disk and install it. For folks like my Dad, this kind of thing isn’t too big an inconvenience. You can start up a backup, go off and do something else, and come back to a restored system. However, it’s the kind of thing that I’d like to try to avoid in my day to day work, especially when I’m on deadline. If this sounds like you, you’ll want to look at having a ready copy of your boot volume by using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner. SuperDuper! has also been a great Mac OS X choice, but isn’t quite ready for Leopard yet. Hopefully, it will be soon.

Great……i was just going to test it myself…..but now ?

Yeah right…..Trust….but Verify hehe

The default setting of TimeMachine let you backup only to directly connected drives (usb & firewire i guess) but not to the network.

Well sounds pretty far away from perfect…at least for me.

To enable the network support open Terminal.app and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now TimeMachine should support unsupported network volumes.